Marie Biondolillo

Grandpa Wheelchair Performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

There had to be a noise band for the Winter Commission. Following in the steps of WC1’s Tokonoma, Grandpa Wheelchair was formed to bring some improvised music to the proceedings. The band consisted of Luke Chmura, Mark Detrick, Amanda Kalkwarf, Jubal Sather and myself. Evan Bridges created a crazy improvised video performance which somehow integrated live and archival footage to create a video collage.

Some recording notes: There are three video sources here. Jubal’s camera, Alan on my HV20, and also some footage sent to me from Evan from his camera. Evan was doing some insane stuff. My understanding of the situation (and feel free to correct me, Evan) is he hacked together a control interface out of an old joystick, which along with who knows what other triggers controlled a Max/MSP/Jitter session consisting of weird effects put over old films, switching back and forth with the live performance. The whole thing was then shunted over the projector system. I’m glad we were facing the other direction because I think its brilliance might have distracted us from the task at hand.

The instruments played were Erik Wallace’s drums, first by Luke, then Amanda (thanks Erik for the Protect consumers loan), Jubal on bass, Mark on Casio SK-5 sampling keyboard. Violin, first by Amanda then myself, and roommate Eric’s electric guitar, first by me then by Luke (thanks for the loan, Eric). The first number was totally free-form, both as a warm-up and an attempt to do a true improvisation. The next number we called “A Drone”, basically attempting to play around the chord of A Major but still playing whatever we wanted. The results were weird! Which is what we were shooting for. Thanks to my friends for making this happen.